Peer to Peer and Spam in the Internet

RobertDHaskins writes "A very interesting series of papers from Helsinki University of Technology on the topics of P2P and spam. Written by PhD students they are a little long, but some very good coverage of the state of the art."

Comments

Bias?

[gid13]

From the paper: "The idea was to learn about the disruptive and also annoying phenomena that have become very commonplace over the past couple of years in the internet: namely, the Peer-to-Peer traffic and applications and the unsolicited and unwanted e-mail or Spam."

I think bundling p2p and spam is either totally missing the point, or attempting to influence the opinions of people who don't know better. The users of p2p want what they get for the most part (maybe not viruses and fakes, but the author seems to be targeting p2p due to the copyrighted content).

Re:Bias?

[happyfrogcow]

universities, from what i hear, have enormous problems with the amount of p2p traffic hogging bandwidth.

P2P is in its infancy

[CrazyJim0]

Its true that a bunch of computers can simulate a server for a game.

If you have 6 computers transfering information to each of them, you can create almost the same environment that 6 computers feeding off a server is.

If you place the anti-cheat code on every computer, you form a community to check against cheats.

If you also store every character's information on every computer, then you can watch for hacks there too.

Given its extrodinarily complicated, and fails to mob rule(conspiracy of hackers to overwhelm the system)... Its something that could be done.

I'm sure theres even more complicated things you can do with P2P, such as organizing nodes for filesharing and so on.

Re:P2P is in its infancy

[Dukael_Mikakis]

What you say is true, and is the perfect solution ... in the same sense that Communism is the perfect government (don't call Homeland Security).

Communism depends on every person contributing (essentially) equally and taking equally, and the system falls apart if one (or worse, several) individuals decide to take advantage of the community.

This is why Blizzard had to instigate centralized servers where all the games are run, and all Diablo characters were stored. People were hacking and HexEditing their characters too much to be trusted.

The trust ring would help, but, like you say, a mob of cheaters can bring the whole thing down by sufficiently fooling the community into believing the hack over the truth.

I mean, just look at P2P (or filesharing) today. When grabbing something off of Kazaa, music you're downloading could be pr0n, or a different song, or a 30 second sample that the RIAA put on to prevent the real one from being grabbed. However, from a centralized, controlled server (iTunes) you know what you're getting beforehand (essentially) cheat-free.

Of course, with true P2P everybody gets access to the product mostly free, whereas in the capitalistic model of iTunes, one entity has all the power and control, and hence will be profiting from all of this.

Helsinki? Finland? Why in english then?

[MikeCapone]

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't it curious that these papers from a Finn university are in english?

Re:Spam is very simple to fix.

[ron_ivi]

Or use a "sender pays but only if the recipient wants to charge" scheme.

For example, every email has a button saying "charge the sender $0.10". It's at the recipient's option whether or not to charge the guy.

For emails from friends I'd never hit the button. For spams I would.

Re:Spam is very simple to fix.

[MicktheMech]

For emails from friends I'd never hit the button. For spams I would.

Yeah, but some people would just make everyone pay. I'm sure it's a supportline operators dream. It may not pay much, but it would definitely recoup some expenses. The minute there's a possibility that I'll have to pay for every e-mail I send is the day I stop sending them.

Re:Google HTML Link...

[Woogiemonger]

...for those that don't wanna read the PDF:

Got another link? That HTML version yer pointing to only goes up to page 49 out of well over 100 pages. I guess google's automatic PDF to HTML conversion caps itself at 49 pages.

A collection of amateurish papers

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like a collection of papers from a first-year compsci class assignment.

For example, this is in the introduction to the Freenet section:

While censorships are necessary in maintaining law and order in a society

Um, many people might disagree with that little gem.

It's actually kind of funny

[Atario]

The professor is clearly biased (or purposely acting biased) against P2P, lumping it together with spam as "parasitic and threaten[ing of] the purpose the Internet was designed for". How he figures sending files to one another is a subversion of the Internet's purpose, I dunno.

But the students' papers are all about how effective and efficient the various P2P architectures out there are and how they might be improved. Heh. Bless you, students.